Fighting Back Against Data Center Sprawl

Concerned citizens across the country are pushing back against the data centers that have begun to dot their communities. These advocates are seeing some success: $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed due to local, bipartisan activism, according to the watchdog group Data Center Watch, which also noted at least 124 activist groups have formed across 24 states. 

We reached out to a few of these groups to learn more about their strategies for successfully pushing back and for keeping organizing momentum alive.

North Virginia

Nowhere understands the impact of data centers quite like North Virginia, which is home to hundreds of these facilities and has been dubbed the data center capital of the world. The region got its first large data center proposal in 2017, according to Julie Bolthouse, director of land use for the Piedmont Environmental Council, a Virginian environmental advocacy group. 

 “It was on a globally endangered ecological system called the Mafic Barren,” she says. “It was a significant site that we were trying to protect.”

There was a lot of local opposition, but the project was still approved. That experience showed local environmental advocates like Bolthouse how powerful these proposals were at swaying local officials. “ We realized that this was a threat to all the conservation work that we’d been doing since 1972,” she says.

Quickly, more and more data center projects were being approved, and the Piedmont Environmental Council began to document the data center blitz on its website to give residents all the information in one place and help them visualize the impact. Their strategy worked: Immediately, the group got calls from concerned residents all over the state, so they decided to form the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition.

“It’s really a very broad spectrum of interests that we’ve brought together on the single issue of data centers,” including people concerned with historic preservation, land trust conservation, public health, watershed protection, noise, energy rates, and air quality, she says. 

The coalition created four bipartisan pillars of data center reform — enhanced transparency, state oversight, protection for families and businesses, and incentives for efficiency — that all the different interest groups agreed on. “Even if climate action wasn’t their bailiwick or water conservation wasn’t their thing, everybody kind of agreed that yeah, we should at least incentivize better practices,” Bolthouse says.

Indiana

In March 2025, Brittany York learned through a neighbor about a proposal for a Google data center in her Southeast Indianapolis neighborhood. She soon found herself among those leading the charge against the facility. By September, Google withdrew their rezoning petition for the data center, much due to their efforts. 

One strategy York used to mobilize her neighbors was putting things into perspective. That meant not only explaining how much water and electricity the data center would use, but also comparing its scale to other buildings in the neighborhood. When York told people that the Google building would be roughly four times the size of the nearby Ikea, it really grabbed their attention, she says.

Battling against data centers, York notes, typically includes attending and speaking at a lot of public meetings. She recommends giving group members specific roles for presentations at these meetings, based on their expertise. 

For example, one of York’s advocacy partners did the main presentation at one meeting because she’s a CPA who is  “used to getting down and dirty in the numbers and all the regulations and codes.” York, who works as a paralegal, responded to questions about the presentation due to her ability to put together a cohesive response “on the fly” from her notes. 

 “I wouldn’t say that there’s any one person necessarily in charge,” York says. “It’s definitely a team effort across the board, and we try to allocate tasks and play to our strengths.”

Michigan

Christy McGillivray was working at the Sierra Club in January 2024 when she first read  about coal plants staying online because the energy demand from data centers required them to keep operating. 

“It became crystal clear that our ability to transition to renewable energy was going to be directly threatened by a massive data center build-out,” she says. 

Fast forward to today, and she’s working as the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, an advocacy group working on nonpartisan structural reform for democracy.

McGillivray sees a direct connection between data center build-out and “the fact that our democracy has been purchased by Silicon Valley tech billionaires.” So instead of fighting each data center individually, her strategy is to fight against political corruption and against tax breaks for data centers.

Still, McGillivray emphasizes that there are ways to stop individual data centers from moving forward. She encourages building a list of people who can organize to get a data center moratorium going and getting community members on board by explaining to them what the data center will be used for. 

For example, the potential for data centers to support surveillance tech, she says, can be a good starting point for conversations about the impact these data centers will have. Discussions about the potential uses of the data, she says, can serve as a jumping-off point to other concerns, including environmental and health effects.

What You Can Do

• Bring together established local groups concerned with issues like historic preservation, public health, watershed protection, energy rates, noise, and air quality.
• Focus on establishing shared, bipartisan principles for reform.
• Translate the data center’s scale into local terms by comparing its size and resource use (water, electricity) to that of familiar neighborhood landmarks.
• Engage community members by explaining what the data center will be used for, such as its potential to support surveillance tech, which can open up conversations about environmental and health effects.
• Regularly attend and speak at public meetings, and assign specific presentation roles at meetings based on people’s expertise.